of 1841, when Speed returned home to Louisville. The two men remained close lifelong friends. Lincoln’s presidential secretaries John Nicolay and John Hay (the latter the nephew of Milton Hay, “young Hay” of the novel) wrote in their 1890 biography that Speed “was the only—as he was certainly the last—intimate friend that Lincoln ever had.”
Indeed, Lincoln would become close to several members of Speed’s large family during his life. Speed’s older brother James, depicted in the opening pages here, was named U.S. Attorney General by President Lincoln in 1864 and served in that position at the time of Lincoln’s assassination. He is best known to history for issuing the legal opinion that the Lincoln conspirators should be tried by a military commission rather than in civilian courts. Speed’s sister Martha was the youngest of the Speed children who survived into adulthood.
As portrayed in the novel, 1837 was a momentous year. The nationwide currency crisis, sparked in part by the closing of the Second Bank of the United States, set off the Panic of ’37, which would mire the country in a deep depression until the early 1840s. Meanwhile, in Springfield, only the lonely capitol cornerstone—laid on July 4, 1837—marked the coming arrival of the state government, which was moving there from the previous state capital, Vandalia. The state legislature, with Lincoln a prominent member, would first meet in Springfield in December 1839.
The trial at the heart of These Honored Dead is inspired by a number of actual cases Lincoln handled during his long and varied legal career. A surprisingly large number of Lincoln’s cases involved questions of insanity. And several defendants in Lincoln’s cases disappeared before justice was served. Among the murder defendants Lincoln represented was one Melissa Goings, charged with killing her abusive husband by striking him on the head with a piece of firewood. Goings fled during a recess in her trial. When the trial judge accused Lincoln of having encouraged her flight, Lincoln is said to have responded: “Your Honor, I did not chase her off. She simply asked me where she could get a good drink of water, and I said Tennessee has mighty fine drinkin’ water.”
Beyond Lincoln and Speed, many of the characters in the novel are drawn from life. At the time the novel is set, Judge Jesse B. Thomas Jr. presided over the Circuit Court for Sangamon County; David Prickett was the state’s attorney; Stephen Logan was the senior lawyer in Springfield and Lincoln’s patron; Henry van Hoff was the carriage maker; Cyrus G. Saunders ran the Globe Tavern (where Lincoln and Mary Todd would later live during their first years of marriage); and Speed and Lincoln’s circle of friends included the newspaperman Simeon Francis, Billy the Barber, the court clerk James Matheny, the young office boy Milton Hay, and the store clerks William H. Herndon (later to become Lincoln’s final law partner) and Charles Hurst, who shared the other bed in the room above Speed’s store.
Eighteen-year-old Mary Todd spent the summer of 1837 in Springfield, lodging with two of her older sisters, Elizabeth and Francis, who had previously moved there from their home in Lexington, Kentucky. After returning to Lexington to work at Ward’s school as an apprentice teacher for two years, Mary would move to Springfield permanently in June 1839.
Frederick Julius Gustorf was a young, well-born Prussian who toured Illinois in the 1830s and kept a journal he intended for publication in his native land. Earlier during his American journeys, he had tutored Harvard and Yale students in German; by some accounts, he was the first-ever German-language instructor at Harvard.
Shortly after the time when the novel ends, Dr. Amariah Brigham founded the New York State Lunatic Asylum at Utica, New York. It was one of the first modern insane asylums in the country.
The 1840 federal census counted 116 African-Americans among Springfield’s total population of 2,579, including 6 “slaves” (notwithstanding the fact that slavery did not, as a legal matter, exist in Illinois) and 110 “free colored persons.” A number of these “free colored persons” were bound in strict contracts of indentured servitude, a system explicitly allowed by Illinois’s Black Code.
Separately, an 1840 “inventory of the slaves” at the Speed estate Farmington near Louisville, Kentucky, listed the first names, ages, and “value” of some 56 enslaved persons owned by the Speed family. Among these was Phillis, then age 43, with a “value” of $300, and Sinderella, then age 4, with a “value” of $250. While the inventory does not indicate familial relationships